Control of the Internet

and if push came to shove, all the gov't needs to do is ask IANA to scrap the .ir root domain name and poof...all of Iran's web servers go to sh*t and can't be accessed by name. They can still be accessed by IP, if one knows the public IP address of the hosting web server, but we can take it one step further and lock out their subnets from our routers, thus completely isoloating their servers from the rest of the net. We can cyberf**k Iran out of existence because we control the internet's root servers and routers. I don't know why the gov't isn't blocking the domain names and IPs' of well known Al Qaeda and radical islamic websites, but I am sure they are actively sniffing traffic to those sites and collecting intel for covert operations.

It is true that the US could delete ".ir" from the current DNS root servers, but any DNS administrator worth his salt could work around this in a few minutes.

It is very easy to set up replacement root servers anywhere in the world and edit routing tables to direct requests to them, cutting the US servers out of the loop. This could easily be done in a day or less and would require only one small change at most ISPs to enable it for their customers.

In fact, any company or ISP can bring ".ir" back online for their employees/customers in under 15 minutes by simply doing a zone transfer from the root servers to their own DNS servers, then adding in the deleted records.

This is obvious to any network administrator, so I would be very surprised if the US ever tried such a thing. Iran would be online again in a day or so, and the negative publicity cost to the US would be significant.

These facts should be obvious to those making the claim, so we should look elsewhere for their motives.